She didn’t get any further. He looked at her and she could almost see the triumph glittering in his eyes.
‘Don’t you? That wasn’t the message I was getting the other night.’
For a moment she didn’t realise what he meant, and then, as his gaze dropped slowly and mockingly to her breasts, she did, and her skin burned.
‘That was because I was cold,’ she told him defensively. ‘I told you at the time.’
‘Yes, you told me,’ he agreed mockingly. ‘But both of us knew you were lying. However, if you’d prefer me to prove it to you…’
She was wearing a simple cotton dress, fitted at the waist, short-sleeved, with a pleated skirt and buttons all the way down the front, and before she could stop him, holding her easily with his left hand, Marcus deftly flicked open the buttons, revealing the creamy paleness of her skin right down to her waist.
‘Marcus…no,’ Maggie breathed, knowing even as she spoke that she was fighting a losing battle, not so much against him but against herself. Once he touched her…once she felt the warmth of his hands against her flesh…his mouth… She shuddered, deeply frightened by the depth of her craving to be part of him…frightened by her inability to hold on to sanity and remember just why he was doing this.
Another plea of protest whimpered in her throat, but Marcus wasn’t listening to her. All his attention was concentrated on the exposed V of flesh revealed as he pushed aside the unfastened bodice of her dress to reveal the swelling softness of her breasts concealed only by the flimsy lace structure of her bra.
He made a sound deep in his throat and goose-pimples rose up under her skin, her nipples instantly hardening.
What a betraying reaction, and he hadn’t even touched her, Maggie acknowledged weakly. When he did…
When he did, his hands were so gentle that she almost cried out at the tenderness of his touch. As his fingers drew gently on the hard buds of flesh, her spine arched like a bow, all thought of resistance draining from her as her body burst into flames at his touch.
She forgot where they were…or why they were there. She forgot what time it was, what day it was, everything bar the fact that she
was actually here at the place she had yearned to be so desperately for so long, at last within the magic circle of Marcus’s desire.
His mouth grazed the slender arch of her throat, one hand hard and flat against her spine, supporting her, while his other hand tormented the aching peak of her breast, her senses screaming silently for him to free it from the prison of her bra and to place his mouth against its swollen heat and suck it until he had drawn away completely the frenzied, burning need that rolled inside her.
But oddly, when he did what she had yearned for him to do, she discovered that the fierce movement of his mouth against her flesh increased her desire rather than caused it to abate, and not just increased it, but spread it until there was not a part of her body that didn’t ache and throb so violently that she could scarcely draw breath without setting off destructive tremors of sensation.
She touched her own mouth to Marcus’s throat, feeling the flesh burn and jump. Her nails scored fiercely against his skin as he released her breast and held her against his body until the sensation of her hard nipples pressed against his bare flesh made him shudder wildly and cover her mouth with his own.
She must have unfastened his shirt, Maggie realised dizzily as he took her hands and pushed them, palms flat, against his torso. While she touched the hard, golden flesh, he shrugged out of his shirt, and she watched him easing himself slightly away from her, trembling from head to foot, caught fast in the toils of sensations so intense that her slender body could scarcely contain them.
‘Maggie,’ Marcus muttered thickly, reaching for her and moaning something in her ear far more shocking than anything she had overheard between Isobel and Paul. But she was beyond being shocked by what he said, beyond anything other than glorying in her body’s total response to him, responding to his verbal torment by pressing herself against him and feeling him shudder deeply. His hands slid inside her dress, skimming her hips and then grasping the round softness of her bottom, kneading the flesh so urgently that her whole body quickened.
She bit frantically at his skin, feeling his muscles flex, feeling the male hardness of him against her as he moved her legs so that he could push one of his between them.
Heat rose up inside her, the fantasies of her teenage years forgotten as she responded frantically to his touch, her teeth biting eagerly at his skin, while her mouth trembled betrayingly against it. The hardness of him, so tantalisingly close to her own flesh and yet so frustratingly far away from the place where she most wanted it to be, made her moan deep in her throat, her body writhing helplessly against him.
‘Tell me you want me,’ he demanded harshly against her ear, encouraging the wanton movement of her hips with his hands, hands that spanned and cupped the soft round shape of her, and yet somehow at the same time contrived to torment her with brief, far more intimate caresses that she ached to prolong.
‘Tell me,’ he demanded again, his voice raw and uneven, and his hand moved, sliding inside her briefs to touch her where her quivering flesh had been yearning for him for what seemed like a lifetime.
Maggie moaned, incapable of saying a word as her body pulsed and expanded, trembling on the threshold of a pleasure that beckoned like a mirage, and like a mirage vanished when Marcus removed his hand.
Shivering and suddenly shockingly aware of what she was doing, Maggie tried to pull away from him, protesting, ‘No, Marcus… Not now, not here…’
Instead of letting her go, he gripped her arms savagely, his face contorted and suddenly unfamiliar.
‘Yes,’ he told her thickly. ‘Yes, Maggie. Yes…right here and right now. Like this.’ And as he pushed her back against the desk she heard the metallic sound of his zip being unfastened, and in the brief seconds of panic that followed, she had time only to moan a short protest before she felt him lifting her, holding her and then filling her with strong, determined thrusts that blasted from her mind everything bar the frantic, urgent ache that was buried somewhere deep inside her, and the knowledge that she must help him find and ease if she had to die to do so.
The pain, so sharp and so unexpected in the midst of so much frantic pleasure, made her tense and open her eyes in shock, to find Marcus looking back at her, not just in shock but in disbelief and something else, something tinged with pleasure and regret. But before she could question it his body surged against her, and as he fought to control it and ease away from her the pain died and the need grew, and instead of releasing him she clung, whimpering her protests into his throat, her body arching so provocatively and pleadingly against him that he tensed and then covered her mouth with his own to silence the small sounds she was making, his body driving so fiercely into hers that she convulsed with pleasure at each stroke, causing him to cry out sharply, unable to hold back on his own need.
What seemed like a long time after the first strong, convulsive spasms of pleasure had passed, Maggie could still find tiny shudders of after pleasure rippling through her, causing her to shiver openly as Marcus looked down at her broodingly.
‘I had no idea that there hadn’t been anyone else,’ he told her flatly, withdrawing from her and turned his back on her as he struggled with his jeans.
In a state that approached complete mental and physical exhaustion, Maggie made no attempt to redress herself. She tried to move, wincing at the soreness in her muscles, and Marcus swung round to look at her.